Julie Parsons, Mary, Mary
When 20-year-old Mary Mitchell disappears, Margaret, her mother, harasses the police with phone calls, but is not taken seriously. But when Mary’s body is found, with proof that she has been raped and battered, inspector McLoughlin feels guilty, and is ready to help Margaret, to whom he also feels attracted.
But Margaret seems to have lost confidence in the police, to the point that she hides things from them: strange phone calls, and disturbing photos she gets in the mail. A psychiatrist, Margaret knows a lot about psychopaths and she wants for the one who killed her daughter to pay…
Despite the good reviews and the fact that Julie Parsons has been compared to Ruth Rendell or Minette Walters, and despite my own efforts to enjoy it, I found this novel extremely tedious and disappointing. The comparison to Rendell is particularly unfair, since Rendell’s writing style is flawless, simple and effective, straight to the point, whereas Julie Parsons’s long-winded sentences are really counterproductive in terms of suspense and atmosphere. I also disliked her way of constantly inserting flashbacks at odd moments, without warning, making an already uninteresting plot even harder to follow. The whole story was slow going and unengaging, as were the characters.
I went though with the reading for two (bad) reasons: the first is that originally, I had bought I Saw You, by the same author, and when I realized that it was a sequel, I looked for Mary, Mary, to read it first. So that I now “have to” read the sequel to a book I did not like, which I might attempt since Mary, Mary is the author’s first novel and maybe with more experience Parsons improved her style… The second reason is that the reviews promised twist and turns during the course of the novel, and although there are some, it did nothing at all to raise my enthusiasm or interest…
Rating: 2/5
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